Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

September 29, 2006

From the upcoming Star Trek auction at Christie's. The catalog is a hoot. The tribbles are est. at $ 800-1200. Looks like someone at Christie's fun withthe flash intro. page and the writing of all the lot notes and descriptions. The sale has costumes, weapons, borg pods, tricorders, model ships, and ephemera.

September 28, 2006

A Very Short List, a new e-mail newsletter and site that highlights one daily thing you should know, could one day find itself with a very big list. IAC's new project which both PaidContent and Gawker refer to mainly as Barry Diller's reponse to not being able to buy Daily Candy is in fact more than that.

-Its editor and contributors, Simon Dumenco and Kurt Anderson are very very smart.

-It is starting nationallyand globally rather than local, which it could expand to as it gains traction. It ties in nicely with IAC's properites and links to commerce.

- The design is great. A really good looking and simple page that combined with the fact that
the header graphic changes daily to reflect the pick. I love the graphs next to each post that define the pick within other cultural reference points

But the most interesting piece for me are the future tools. (Just guessing here) They seem to be building the ability for users to build their own lists, they are also planning a widget so that you could place your lists on your blog. I bet this widget will also carry a recent editorial pick or two. Then top lists and community group intelligence about the lists. I love lists and the combination of smart editorial to help people get started making their own lists is a powerful thing.

According to this quiz we are all nerds, geeks, or dorks or a mixture of all three. According to them I am
56 % Nerd, 26% Geek, 34% Dork which equals Pure Nerd. They do explain it in the following way:

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally
smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up
all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer.
Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more
so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be
replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

September 27, 2006

September 26, 2006

Amazon's homepage greeted me today with the news that they sell over 500 kinds of cereal. The more I thought about it the more Glutino, Orgran, and Vitaspelt reminded me of the early days of the cereal craze of the 1880s that were immortalized by The Road to Wellville with EnviroKidz, and Save The Forest looking like the oddball companies.

Go delicious! TechCrunch on delicious having 1,000,000 members and the refreshing opinion that there is room in the space.

This tells me that there is plenty of room for more services to provide
these types of services, despite the exhaustion some of us feel every
time a new one emerges. It also indicates that there is something far
more interesting about Digg than the size of its contributing users.

If you've got a favorite online community -- one with
a healthy roster of users who exchange comments, engage in forums or
otherwise interact -- go down Prof. Oldenburg's list and see if it fits
the bill.

Interesting article by Edward Rothstein in the NYT about Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism . It ends with "..., so messianic were expectations, that many failed to see that
cyberspace was not really a different realm from the hard-wired world
of ordinary experience, but would become an extension of it: a place
where banking, shopping, conversation and business transactions could
take place, where the bourgeois world and an imagined frontier would
again have to work out their uneasy relations, and would again face an
uncertain future."

September 22, 2006

Philly Sound and Maps Mashup
- Here is a fantastic new Google Maps mashup from the "Official Visitor
Site of Greater Philadelphia" (gophila.com) that combines sound with
Google Maps. It's called Sound About Philly.
Various guided audio tours bring you through Philadelphia's history,
"flavorhoods", and residents' perspectives of this great city. You can
also create your own sound mapmash and leave it for others to view.
It's a model mashup for other city tourism sites!

Philadelphia has a promotional podcast. The news is that as a walking tour, it's not totally lame.

The idea behind Sound About Philly
was to create a series of audio bits for visitors and locals to hear
while sauntering around town with an iPod - or for someone listening
in Peoria by laptop.

It debuted yesterday, this project from the Greater Philadelphia
Tourism Marketing Corp, and it's got promise. Teams of interviewers
have roamed about, telling stories of the usual places as well as the
unsung spots that give this city its charm....

September 20, 2006

A friend attended a conference that 360i hosted yesterday and reports that their Top 10 Emerging On-line trends are:

1. long
tail

2. mash-ups

3. microformats

4. mobile
search

5. Q & A sites
6. social search

7. personalization/customized engines

8. RSS

9. tagging and tag clouds

10. User-generated content

11. Social media

12. virtual worlds

No surprises here but it has led to several people around me checking out Second Life. I knew it was only a matter of time after the Monday NYT article about MTV introducing a virtual world. I was just shown something called a SLurl which enables a store to open a presence in SL. Here is a link to one used by American Apparel. It reminds me of a company a former colleague started in 1998 in which a person's bookmarks could be kept in a virtual world and companies could sponsor planets or buy spots.

One thing I'm planning to do this weekend is visit the Doctors Without Borders Refuge Camp Exhibit in Prospect Park. Several years ago I visited the War Museum in London, which is actually located in Bedlam, the famous asylum. They had a WWI exhibit in which you walked through trenches and smelled (non-lethal) mustard gas. It changed the way I interpreted everything I read about that war. The sense-o-rama of disaster is the opposite of watching television coverage. I think their placement at the top of the Long Meadow is brilliant. It wouldn't take much to imagine this stretching to the horizon and beyond.

"Scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed
Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could
sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole
itself...If this anomaly continues, the Northeast Passage, or 'Northern Sea
Route' between Europe and Asia will be open over longer intervals of
time, and it is conceivable we might see attempts at sailing around the
world directly across the summer Arctic Ocean within the next 10 to 20
years." Link to Yahoo News article about polar ice melting between Norway, The North Pole, and Russia.

September 18, 2006

I'm excited to announce that SoundAbout Philly a project I developed with the GMTMC (Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation) soft-launched this morning. Over a year and a half ago I began working with the GPTMC and the Pew Trust on creating a site that would enable people to download walking tours of Philadelphia with the idea of turning the city into a living museum. The project which started as an idea that I shared with a friend of a friend at the Pew (who had been thinking about similar things) and then in turn with the GPTMC has turned out much the way I envisioned it.

The tours are free

Segments are individual units

They are tied to a Google map mash-up

They can be customized and tailored by interest and time

They can be shared with others

It is scalable and they continue to have new tours added over the next year

The project was for me a way to get right many of the things that went wrong with CityReads, the audio tour company I started several years ago, and it means a lot to me that it is now in the world. It has been a long process that began two summer ago, got going last Fall when the Pew gave the GPTMC a grant for the project, with a buildout this summer. The GPTMC put together a super team of local resources and used the developer of their larger site to make it happen. They have a wonderful organization which has organized to put their marketing and promotional resources behind it which is pretty thrilling. During this long process, there were some personnel and technical changes (at one point I was actually going to build the thing) but I stayed with it, and it has been a real pleasure to help make it happen, overall I'm very very pleased with the site.

"I get into the trees and sometimes can't see the forest" - Overheard during a lunch-time walk . Also from my walk it seems the President is visiting the NYPL today. It is cordoned off and has a large white canopy coming down the steps. Perhaps he will check out another existentialist novel, or a book on torture. Any ideas?

Avatars are back and "part of a strategy to move a generation ahead of what media rivals were doing on-line." A whole generation!

September 17, 2006

On Sat, B and I went on a bike tour of the edges of Queens with Bettina Johae, an artist whose project was part of the Conflux Festival. Bettina has ridden over 500 miles exploring the water lined boundaries of all of the boroughs of NY, except Manhattan. The tour was great, really slow moving, and eccentric. We met at the Howard Beach Stop of the A train and started by riding down a railway service road to Hamilton Beach. We rode down dead ends to see if they ended at the water, met a fellow who owned a shack on stilts, saw fishermen standing chest deep under the subway bridge over to the Rockaways, and explored an area we had never been to in a way that few people had. Along for the ride was the official historian for Manhattan, a trainer for the MTA, and a photographer friend of Bettina's. I rode my Brompton. B and I left the group to eat lunch on N116th street at a place called the Wharf. It is on the water behind a Duane Reed and seems to mostly serve people who pull up in boats. The we took the train back. It was a great urban adventure.

September 11, 2006

As my subway was crossing the Manhattan Bridge this morning I heard "For purple mountain majesties..." at first I couldn't tell where it was coming from and I looked around to see if any passengers were playing their iPods really loudly. The verses continued and I realized that it was coming from the train's speakers, the conductor was singing America the Beautiful very softly with some nice flourishes. As we pulled into Canal Street station he said something very nice about people who may have lost someone and then he wished us all a safe day.

He did it thoughtfully; singing softly (which proves that the PA system on trains could be used to speak in moderate and ungarbled ways), and not invoking any specific religion. It was short, appropriate and endurable, and the his timing was good, when we could all see the Statue of Liberty and the buildings of downtown come into view. If he had been driving the same train five years ago he would have seen the smoke from the buildings (I can't remember if train service had halted by then). So I appreciate that he needed to do it and thank him for the moment. It is a day for sadness not only for what happened that day but for what has happened to our country since then which Josh Marshall sums up pretty well.

September 08, 2006

Democratic Underground has this on it's site about the creators of "The Path to 9/11" It's an interesting read.

Yesterday, DUer shewhomustbeobeyed discovered
that David Cunningham, director of "The Path to 9/11," is the son of
Loren Cunningham, founder of the worldwide evangelical group Youth With
a Mission.

Youth With a Mission has an "auxiliary branch" called The Film Institute.

Members of The Film Institute write:

TFI's first project is a doozy: simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project,
it is already being called the television event of the decade and not
one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!

Our
goal is to help filmmakers, actors, technicians, etc. realize their God
given potential and purpose in perhaps the most influential sphere of
modern culture - film and television.

Here's more information on the "Untitled History Project":

Our
next big project is to assist in the development of the new YWAM
auxiliary - The Film Institute (TFI). The Film Institute is dedicated
to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and
Television industry;

TO it, by serving, living humbly with
integrity in what is often a world driven by selfish ambition, power an
money - transforming lives from within, and THROUGH it, by creating
relevant and evocative content which promotes Godly principles of Truth
married with Love.